Saturday, August 21, 2010

A word of advice if you are going to work in Korea, actually two words.

First, open your own bank account. For you. If an employer starts talking about opening an account that they have access to they are trying to scam you. Only YOU should have access to your account. I have heard of several people falling for that scam over the years. You also DON'T have to have an account at your bosses bank. Transferring money is EASY and cheap in Korea.

Secondly, pay your own bills. Bill payment is very easy in Korea. In most cases they will take it right out of your account. For those that don't most banks have a machine that can read the bills (most have bar codes they read) and you can make payment there without going to a teller. Even in the worst case scenario you just go to a teller and pay it.

One of the way Ivy School scammed money out of foreign teachers was by "doing us a favour" and paying our bills. They deducted money and then when you were leaving deducted more saying you didn't pay your bills. Since most hagwons give NO pay stub you have no way of proving what they did or didn't deduct.

By paying yourself you can prevent BS like this from happening to you.

1 comment:

Yes, always get a receipt. For EVERYTHING. Even if they try to guilt you into forgoing it, just return their poker face.Korean companies will lie to you and if you have no receipt there's not much you can do. You can't rely on them to remember anything and they have such a high turnover of employees who've been similarly nickle and dimed you're on your lonesome anyways.I'm not even sure they consider it cheating...they probably just think they're clever in a passive-agressive way.ie if I can cheat this person out of 200K then they never deserved to have that money from me in the first place kind of thing.I can see why my Korean Vietnam Vet father-in-law carries a 7 iron in his boot.Grrrr. Korea. It's Korean for aggravation.Good luck with ESL teaching in London. I haven't gone down that route but may need to soon. I'd imagine you'd have a lot of Polish (a million poles came to the UK last decade), African (ie Somali) and Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi students if you're in a language school kind of place, and a broader spread if in a tertiary one.